Cabs are expensive, but most of the expense is paying the driver. Once you get rid of the worker, it gets a lot cheaper.Also, with centralized control, routes can be optimized so the taxis are always driving and carying passengers.It's not slightly cheaper than driving, it can potentially cost an order of magnitude less, and be faster.Where I live, public transport is easily 5-6 times less expensive than driving, combining bus and cab rides, including the labor cost of drivers.

About keeping it clean, and accountability, we are now used to be identified always. The cars can have cameras, and even require an id for you to ride them (they won't be taking cash, after all). There would be abuse, but it would be close to trivial to punish that kind of thing.

If there's vomit in the car, the car should be able to detect that, and go to a cleaning station. In the event that you do get an unsuitable car, you can just reject it. You could even look at a stream of the inside of the car before it gets to your home.

Also, think about the carpooling possibilities. While people don't like sharing space with strangers, price can change some minds.

You don't need to go as far as requiring equal pay. That can be your goal.Knowing salaries is faster, and goes a long way.If you are minority X, face discrimination, and are paid 80k instead of 100k for a white male, it will be hard to get that fixed, but knowing what others make will help you set your goals. Maybe you can get together with others and discover which companies discriminate the most. You might even find out that some company is not discriminating, just pays less to all their employees. Information itself is a very useful tool, and it's actionable right now.

A free market comes with the notion of a price equilibrium. Faster information means faster equilibrium, less room for inefficiencies.

Of course labor market is regulater by government so it's not really a free market. But witholding information from sellers only hurts a free market, as a whole. This makes it effectively a buyers market, which would behave closer to an oligopsony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony). That's inefficient for the market as a whole.

Posted
by
Soulskillon Monday June 29, 2015 @09:37AM
from the all-about-the-bitjamins dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Greece's economy has been in trouble for several years, now, and a major vote next weekend will shake it up even further. The country can't pay its debts, and the upcoming referendum will decide whether they face increased austerity measures or start the process of exiting the Euro. One side effect of the crisis is that alternative currencies like Bitcoin suddenly look much more attractive as the "normal" currencies become unstable. "Tony Gallippi, the co-founder of bitcoin payment processor Bitpay, tweeted on Sunday night that he expected the price of bitcoin to rise to between $610 and $1,250 if Greece exits the Euro. The currency is currently worth $250. Part of the reason why the crisis is so tempting for proponents of the cryptocurrency is the echoes of a previous crisis in the Eurozone: the banking collapse in Cyprus in 2013, which saw that nation also impose capital controls to prevent massive outflows of currency from the panicking country. That collapse came at the same time as the first major boom in the price of bitcoin, which began the year at less than $20 and peaked at ten times that by early April – before it all came crashing down."

I understand if there were some trademark issue, that they _removed_ yt.com/lush, and replaced it with 301 to yt.com/matthewlush . Replacing the page with something else completely will only harm those who try to access the old link. If the company wants anything, they can get yt.com/lushcosmetics or whatever, but they shouldn't misrepresent their content. Users who have the old link expect the old content, that's what URIs are for.

Breaking links is a bad thing (TM), and google has the knowledge to know that you shouldn't break the web. Not for something this lame, at least.

Posted
by
timothyon Monday June 22, 2015 @08:11AM
from the ten-pink-dollars-says-they-are dept.

theodp writes: VentureBeat's Ruth Read casts a skeptical eye at the current rage of toy segregation meant to inspire tomorrow's leaders in STEM: "Toys geared at girls serve to get them interested in coding and building when they're young, hopefully inspiring their educational interests down the road. But these gendered toys may be hurting women by perpetuating a divide between men and women." Read concludes, "Ultimately, girls (who will become women) are going to have to learn and work in a world where genders are not segregated; as will men. That means they need to learn how to interact with one another as much as they need to be introduced to the same educational opportunities. If STEM education is as much for girls as it is for boys, perhaps we should be equally concerned with getting boys and girls to play together with the same toys and tools, as we are with creating learning opportunities for girls."

Posted
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timothyon Sunday June 21, 2015 @06:22PM
from the but-you-get-not-extra-lives dept.

arctother writes: UberDRIVE—Uber's simulation/video game/recruiting tool—is, at best, just a poor copy of a much more interesting video game – driving for Uber. The main innovation of Uber, and other smartphone-enabled "e-hailing" car services, is the insertion of a new interface into the human-to-human, on-the-street interactions between drivers and passengers. Uber attempts to transform the cab-driving and -riding experience through the deployment of an allegorithm: the productive joining of a framing narrative (or "allegory") and software-mediated control (or "algorithm"). Understanding how allegorithms shape experience will become more and more important as they are increasingly deployed with mobile interfaces to reshape and "augment" social interactions. "Ingress," you are already thinking; but you should really think of "Uber."

Fraud is not the main thing here.Uber is paying cab riders bonuses that make riding without passengers profitable. So, they ride without passengers and collect bonuses. Their using fake ids or other illegal is just incidental. Uber itself is probably operating illegally, and nobody cares about that.

Posted
by
timothyon Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:10PM
from the uber-has-a-reputation-for-gaming-too dept.

retroworks writes: Josh Horwitz' story in Quartz reports both the apparent rapid success of Uber adaptation in China, and a queasy footnote for shareholders applauding the rapid growth. While China is a natural ride-sharing haven, it also has a tradition of gaming the western system. From the story: "Accomplices can sit in their apartments, disable location settings, and specify a pickup not far from the actual location of driver's vehicle, the report said. The driver then accepts the hail, and goes on a trip without a passenger. After the accomplice approves payment, the driver will – hopefully – pay back the fee and share a cut of the bonus. It's not the most clever get-rich scheme on the planet. But for drivers, it's better than waiting for a hail in a parking lot." Uber's spokeswoman told the Quartz writer that the company has an on-the-ground team who investigate into these various type of fraud, then uses "deep analytics, and new tools developed by our Chinese engineers in our dedicated fraud team to combat against such fraud." The Uber spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the nature of these tools.

Modularity.This is their current situation. Stuff comes in different sized packages, and placement is not perfect.Of course they could get improvements, even for human workers, if stuff came pre-checked, correctly classified and stuff. The thing is that's not their current status. The idea is to get rid of the picking human, without changing anything other than the human.Self driving cars would be easy with the strategy you propose, just build intelligent roads, wired roads with wireless navigation, no people. Close to what a train is. It makes it a lot easier, but it just can't replace all driving, unless you change the whole infrastructure at once.

I don't think he says it's not his fault, even if he were trying to do that.Employees lawsuits might have been what forced them to close, but those lawsuits are his fault also, so no blame was transferred.

Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday May 29, 2015 @08:14AM
from the grades-for-pay dept.

Vadim Makarov writes: Fifteen Chinese nationals living in the U.S. have been charged with creating an elaborate scheme to take U.S. college entrance exams on behalf of students. For the past four years, the accused provided counterfeit Chinese passports to impostors, who sneaked into testing centers where they took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and others, while claiming to be someone else, according to a federal grand jury indictment. Special Agent in Charge John Kelleghan for Homeland Security Investigations of Philadelphia said: "These students were not only cheating their way into the university, they were also cheating their way through our nation's immigration system."

Posted
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samzenpuson Friday May 29, 2015 @12:30AM
from the mad-max-time dept.

ourlovecanlastforeve writes: With biologists getting closer and closer to reversing the aging process in human cells, the reality of greatly extended life draws closer. This brings up a very important conundrum: You can't tell people not to reproduce and you can't kill people to preserve resources and space. Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone. Not enough food, not enough space, not enough medical care. If — no, when — age reversal becomes a reality, who gets to live? And if everyone gets to live, how will we provide for them?